Ya, the drop off is a little concerning.
That is a lot of players to lose in such a short period of time.
Between the server/matchmaker issues, missing content, and the experience being designed to prop up the in game store I’m not exactly sure anyone can be surprised. ¯\ (ツ) /¯
thats just normal compared to every other shooter on steam bro ?
dude ? halo infinite is very modern and feels smooth many new players are coming in and the player count is higher than cod and battlefield ?
It’s a nice timeline and chart, better than what most players are coming into arguments with, but it tells 1/7th the story on a weekly basis. It also doesn’t fully take into account why the numbers might be what they are.
There’s going to be a initial player plummet, there always is.
The Friday you chose for Launch week doesn’t take into account that the Monday before launch had approximately 150k peak players, yet 124k was the “boost” that the Launch gave the game.
There was a dip this week, most likely in response to the BTB issues that hit the game with the playlist update.
People got exposed to gamepass.
Many Gears players migrated to gamepass. Steam isn’t top dog on pc anymore.
Yes. I chose Friday because it’s overall the day where most people play. It will take more week so the Friday becomes a more accurate representation of the player base. This weekend Halo had an Esport event that draw a lot of attention so there’s that and as you said btb only players can’t play at the moment. So we will see next week and the week after that how it keeps evolving.
no so. aiming with mouse. i cant ever hit all 3 rounds in a burst. thanks to little to no bullet magnetism and and no aim assist. I can not get 1 burst to hit perfectly unless target it stationary. so yeah…
on mk you need super accurate tracking. and I dont know if its me being new to mk (1.5 yr) or people in general are much better on average with mk.
This game will do what all of 343’s games have done… bleed out players down to a ~20k playerbase of dedicated fans who love the game and are willing to put up with all of 343’s incompetence.
343 doesn’t have the first clue how to avoid tripping over themselves with managing their games.
When you launch an FPS with very little content, trash netcode, bad progression systems, predatory monetezation, bugs and stability problems, etc… players will leave.
343 hasn’t addressed a single one of the glaring problems Infinite has. They don’t even have a roadmap for addressing them. They’re just taking a quick Christmas break… remember to buy MTX because servers cost money.
what makes it worse that there are some FTP games out there with a higher standard when it comes to player expression & necessary compromises, Warframe being a prime example of this in some form.
I don’t think warframe is a good comparison as it’s primarily a PVE game.
A better comparison would be Apex legends as that’s F2P PVP. You can grind out a 90% of the cosmetics and the premium battlepass allows you to earn enough premium currency to get the next battlepass or whatever else you might want in the store. Another aspect of Apex is that the battlepass is also primarily Challenge progression and yet these challenges don’t incentivize you to ignore helping your teammates and you can work on most challenges at the same time with the only real exception being the ones to play as a certain set of characters. The store also operates on FOMO and has revolving sets of items.
Honestly it’s almost like 343 looked at Apex Legends and said “hey let’s do this but much worse”
170k+ people were watching the tournament that same Friday, Saturday and Sunday
I mainly compare the two due to how each one does armour customisation, applying apexes skins to Halo doesn’t work since were not playing “characters”, what we are playing boils down to a “character in a suit.” which is why I frequently compare the two on a customisation level, another element is actually the storefront, not relying on Fomo, while Apex does rely on Fomo for its store like you say it does at least allow the player to be rewarded, in otherwords theres a middleman there, Infinite rn has no Middleman.
but as for the rest of the points you are correct.
Yes it’s absolutlety great. I hope it explains such a drop. Although 170k+ seems to be for finals. When I went on the streams Friday it was more like 60k+. I don’t I was not following all weekend.
It was like idk 70k+ on Friday, but peaked at like 250k+ on Sunday. Grand Finals weren’t even the most popular part of it, most popular part was Sentinels/Optic in Elim bracket.
I don’t think its too crazy, Free-to-Play Halo numbers are insane.
The game has a lot of people interested, very few that actually want to play though. Lack of content and basic features makes the game far less fun to play than to watch.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again, 343i fumbled and I question if Infinite/Halo in general will ever recover. I don’t even want to play it, because only decent playlist in my opinion is Ranked and I’m not always in the mood to sweat, and BTB is not even working so the game offers so little.
I’m sure a lot of these viewers (including myself) were watching just for the drops
if Twitch drops were all it took for games to get 250k viewers every game would have them available 24/7 
Those numbers might have been inflated a bit, but stupid to say that 250k people were just there for that. Grand Finals (when you could get that victory pose Twitch drop) weren’t even as popular as it was hours before, which tells me that people were invested in Optic/Sentinels and once they were eliminated a lot of folks left.
Competitive Halo has always been relatively popular, its not too crazy to think that a very popular (F2P) Halo title would get crazy viewership. The bigger question I have is if this is its peak? I don’t even think the event was close to this game’s peak. Settings need some work, prize pool was small (relatively speaking that is) and the competition wasn’t that strong either. Oh and Day 1 was a disaster so I wonder how many people just left after Day 1 due to that and didn’t bother watching the rest of it (initial impressions sort of thing)
Edit: Lots of people may have came for the drops, but most stayed for the entertainment. This is not too relevant, what is relevant is how popular events are moving forward. If it can maintain like 50k-100k viewership numbers that would be insane.
Which explains the drop in players due to people trying to get free skins
Oh maybe. I let the stream play on my phone while I played Halo. Checking every few matches the progress on drops
I actually ended up watching the entire thing on Sunday hahaha
Oh no definitely didn’t imply everyone watching the stream only came for the drops, like you said it may have inflated the numbers slightly. When I was watching the stream, every few comments I saw “drops!”